GEOARCHAEOLOGICAL AND PALAEOENVIRONMENTAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HOLOCENE CLIMATE-ENVIRONMENTAL-HUMAN NEXUS IN THEKURDISTAN REGION OF IRAQ

The geoarchaeological, multiscale approach performed in this research provides several new perspectives for the Holocene paleoclimatic and paleoenvironment reconstruction in the KRI Moreover, it enhances our understanding of the human responses and adaptation to climate, landscape, ecosystem, and natural resources availability changes across the last millennia. The geomorphological analysis and mapping of the Northwestern and Central Kurdistan Region of Iraq offers important insights on the interplay between active tectonic and climatic-driven processes that affected landforms and fluvial development during the Neogene and the Quaternary. Moreover, a detail geomorphological investigation performed on the historical imagery permits to reconstruct the dynamic of local rivers and the submerged riverscape of the Tigris River along the Mosul Dam Lake and identify the main hydrological, geomorphological changes regulated by seasonal variations of the discharge and the litho-structural control on the size and direction. Paleoclimatic data retrieved from a flowstone ranging from 11 to 7.3 ka recorded wetter conditions between 9.7 and 9.0 ka, followed by an abrupt reduction of precipitation between 9.0 and 8.5 ka, and by a wetter interval between 8.5 and 8.0 ka. Comparison with the archaeological data revealed the influence on the socio-economic, technological transformations, variations of the availability of natural resources (water) and settlement dynamics on the widespread of complex societies. The geomorphological mapping of long-time settled landscapes offers important tools for urban planning as much as a plethora of information to reconstruct past human adaptations, subsistence strategies, and early human overprints on pristine geomorphic systems. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the preservation of anthropogenic landforms and their intrinsic archaeological record is today threatened by ongoing surface processes, and in some cases such processes are accelerated by human agency. For instance, we proposed an empirical model usually applied to describe soil loss (RUSLE) and derived from UAV imagery to estimate the rate of erosion along slopes of archaeological sites. In such contexts, the loss of archaeological soils and sediments is tuned by natural and human-driven factors that mining the preservation of archaeological record. The application of micromorphological and sedimentological analysis on the filling sediments of Assyrian canals, examined the different phases of use, abandonment a repurposing disclosed that the formation of their infilling was triggered by a shift in land use related to climate and human dynamics changes. This work further demonstrates that the post-abandonment infillings of negative archaeological structures efficiently support landscape archaeology studies in detecting evidence of past land use and exploitation of natural resources. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as much as in many other parts of the world, the great urban expansion started in the 1950s has completely disrupted the pristine landscape that was the result of a long-lasting and balanced interaction between natural and anthropogenic geomorphic processes. A detailed analysis of the landscape before the intense urbanisation carried out on the town of Erbil, through a collection of historical aerial and satellite images from 1919 to the present day, has documented the large-scale urban expansion that has completely obscured the old rural and fluvial landscape.